Guide · community cafés

Pay-what-you-can community cafés

A pay-what-you-can café looks like any other café — a counter, a menu board, a few tables — but the prices are suggestions. Diners pay what they can afford, pay extra to cover someone else, or work off their meal. Here is how the model works and what has happened to some of its best-known examples.

The idea in one paragraph

“Pay what you can” (PWYC) is a business model that doesn’t depend on set prices: customers pay what they feel the product is worth to them. It can be used by nonprofit or for-profit businesses, either as a one-off promotion or as the regular way of doing business. It is related to the gift economy and to cross-subsidization — the diner who pays more helps cover the one who pays less — and it depends on reciprocity and trust. A useful distinction: “pay what you can” leans toward charity and ability to pay, while “pay what you want” leans toward the customer’s view of the product’s value.

How a typical community café runs

The cafés described in the sources below share a handful of features:

• Suggested prices or a donation box instead of fixed prices, with nobody turned away for being unable to pay.
• Volunteering for a meal. Diners who can’t pay can work a short shift. At Denver’s SAME Café, half an hour of volunteering earns a meal; One World Cafe offered meal vouchers for volunteer work.
• A small, changing menu. SAME Café keeps a limited menu that changes daily, which reduces purchasing variety and food waste.
• Donated or low-cost food from farms, gardens, grocers and warehouse stores.
• A committed on-site leader. The One World Everybody Eats foundation lists an engaged, on-site leader as essential to success.

Three well-documented examples

One World Cafe and the movement it started

Denise Cerreta’s Salt Lake City café was among the first pay-what-you-can community cafés. In 2006 the Birkys of Denver asked for her help, and she traveled to Colorado with volunteers to help open SAME Café. From 2009 she shifted toward mentoring other communities, began hosting an annual networking summit in 2010, and in 2012 the board closed the original café to concentrate on the One World Everybody Eats foundation. The foundation says she has inspired or assisted in opening more than 60 community cafés and that it shares model details, tax documents and business plans openly. Its history also notes that Panera Bread and the Jon Bon Jovi Soul Foundation sought its guidance. The record wasn’t all smooth: Wikipedia reports that in 2011 the café had economic troubles, including bounced checks and an employee walkout.

SAME Café by the numbers

The Birkys invested $30,000 to open SAME Café at 2023 East Colfax Avenue. Figures reported on Wikipedia give a sense of the economics: rent of about $2,500 a month, an average food cost of about $2 per meal, and — according to one reporter’s figure — an average donation of $3.66 per meal. The café served 40–50 meals a day at seven tables before a November 2008 expansion and 75–100 afterwards. Average donations fell over time, but more customers made up the difference. Food comes from local farmers, warehouse stores, higher-end grocers and the Denver Botanic Gardens. Colorado doesn’t require restaurant workers to hold a food handler’s certificate, which is what makes the volunteer-for-a-meal exchange workable there — a reminder that local rules shape what a community café can do.

Panera Cares: scale is not enough

After a 2009 NBC Nightly News segment featured SAME Café, Panera Bread created its own pay-what-you-can cafés in 2010. Wikipedia lists the closures: Chicago at the end of January 2015, Portland at the end of June 2016, the original St. Louis-area café in January 2018, and Boston, the last, on February 15, 2019. The sources don’t give reasons for the closures, but the arc is instructive: even a large company’s backing didn’t keep the model going indefinitely.

What makes the model work — and what to ask

Pulling the sources together, the recurring ingredients are trust, a small menu that keeps costs down, a steady stream of volunteers and donors, and someone on site who holds it together. If you are considering supporting or starting a community café, useful questions include: How are meals costed? What share of diners pay more than the suggested price? How are volunteers trained, and do local food-safety rules allow them in the kitchen? And who mentors the founders — the One World Everybody Eats network exists precisely to answer that last one.

For cafés whose mission is employment rather than food access, see job-training and recovery cafés.